In India, we experience on a daily basis the many manifestations of our digital public infrastructure in almost everything we do. We use the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to pay anyone, anywhere – from high-end restaurants to roadside vendors selling raw coconut water. We store our credentials in the DigiLocker app on our phones, rarely carry identity cards with us as we know that every authority figure – from a traffic policeman to a CISF guard at the airport – will take our digital identity as proof. I am bound to admit that we are who we say we are. With applications like DigiYatra, we are experiencing a previously unimaginable level of convenience when we travel.
The success of this Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is evident in the numbers. UPI now regularly sees over 8 billion transactions a month and aims to exceed one billion transactions daily. Almost everyone in India has an Aadhaar (India’s unique digital identity), which has been used to complete over 89 billion authentications so far. With over 5.5 billion documents stored on DigiLocker, there is no doubt that Indian citizens have enough faith in it to use India’s digital infrastructure as a repository of their personal credentials.
Not surprisingly, many of us have come to believe that of all things DPI, India is the global hub of innovation.
This, as it happens, is not entirely true. Over the past decade, there has been a veritable explosion of digital public innovation around the world. Many countries have built and deployed digital public infrastructure to provide a variety of solutions to their people.
In Sierra Leone, the use of digital wallets during the Ebola crisis allowed response workers to receive fast, accurate and secure payments while in the field, significantly increasing the country’s ability to contain the disease. The mPESA service in Kenya, widely believed to be the oldest mobile money service in the world, is responsible for lifting an estimated 1 million people out of poverty. In the Eastern Caribbean, DCash, a recently launched central bank digital currency (CBDC), is already available in four countries, making it the only currency union in the world to have established a common virtual currency.
The BPNT program in Indonesia has moved more than 1.4 million recipients of subsidized rice to a digital voucher system, which has been rated by nine out of 10 recipients as resulting in more and better quality food. Safe Water Network’s ‘pay-as-you-drink’ solution in Ghana uses prepaid ‘smart’ meters that can be unlocked using an SMS code to improve water service delivery in villages in drylands Triggered by mobile payment. as per latest Off Grid Solar Market Trends ReportThe availability of PayGo digital solutions to deliver user subsidies has accelerated off-grid solar electrification and improved resilience during the pandemic.
A few weeks ago, at a knowledge and experience sharing event for emerging economies from the Global South, participants from around the world had the opportunity to discuss how digital public infrastructure has transformed life in their countries. While most of the innovations they talked about had to do with digital payments, there was almost universal agreement that this DPI approach significantly accelerated the achievement of their social objectives. Almost everyone wanted to learn how they could build on everything they’ve already achieved in order to take even more advantage of the benefits digital public infrastructure has to offer.
Most of the participants were looking to India for guidance. As much as the program made it clear that the use of digital public infrastructure was not unique to India, it was clear that nowhere else had it been scaled up or used to provide solutions across such a wide range of different sectors. India’s stack approach makes it possible for new innovations to be built on top of their previous innovations, resulting in a deeply entrenched ecosystem of products that reuse and extend infrastructure components in synergistic ways.
All of this was of great interest to countries in the Global South, who had already gotten a taste of what digital public infrastructure could do for them and were eager for more. They wanted to know about the design principles underlying India’s digital infrastructure framework and the governance framework around which it was built. While each country has to build digital public infrastructure in its own way so that it best responds to the specific priorities that define it, there is an opportunity to learn how India has implemented open, interoperable protocols, a modular, extensible design philosophy and took advantage of federated data storage. Widely appreciated for creating an ecosystem of digital products.
This is the leadership role that India must play on the world stage in the years to come. With over a decade of experience building digital systems at population scale, no country is better suited to guide countries seeking to achieve similar results. Given the number of different digital ecosystems that we have successfully implemented at home, India is uniquely positioned to extract the key design principles of universal applicability on which all digital public infrastructure should be based.
By sharing this knowledge with the world, we can play an important role in accelerating development.
Rahul Maithon is a partner at Trilegal and has a podcast called Ex Machina. His twitter handle is @matthan
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